I have just spent some three weeks as the spouse of a hospitalized patient. The first two weeks were spent almost exclusively in the hospital with the exception of those nights spent in a motel trying to catch some sleep, showering, shaving, and changing clothes. Hospitals are not completely novel environments for me; I spent the first decade of my career working in one. I now work in an outpatient medical setting and find that the job takes me into hospitals and nursing homes on a moreorless regular basis. What was foreign or novel about the past three weeks was my role in this setting or context.

I found that I kept thinking about Army basic training and how my memory of those days and that experience was so familiar to what I was experiencing right now. I was in a role in which I had not previously been for more than one week. There was all kinds of uncertainty on all fronts as medical staff worked to stabilize one aspect of care after another. There was absolutely nothing that I could do to change the situation in which my wife and I found ourselves at the moment. And I was dead dog tired. I have often found that fatigue is a very interesting lens with which to view real time experience. I seem to lose the ability to contextualize the experience, to modify its impact, and most certainly to control or limit my emotional response to it and the immediate expression of that emotional response.

I can only surmise that the way in which I experienced the past three weeks and the experience itself (Is it even possible to separate the two?) will have a substantive impact on me well into the future.

Please don't assume that I am retired or that anyone else is for that matter. Just because I look old and what little hair I have is gray doesn't mean that my only responsibilities are getting myself out of bed in the morning followed by a little personal hygiene and getting dressed. Most everyone, who reads this blog, knows that I am not retired, which means I am venting about my experiences with non-readers. I suspect there is also a message for myself in all that: don't make assumptions.

There has been a slight change in the clean-up arrangements for the evaporator. On Saturday, the 30th, I packed the refilled L-P gas cylinder and the evaporator parts, that I had brought home to clean up, back out to the sugarhouse. (The recent rains had made it too soft to drive to the sugarhouse, so the pack frame was called out of temporay retirement and taken down off the nail in the basement.) The smaller of the evaporator pans has a small leak--an unsuccessful repair from late last season. It reopened at the start of this season, and we simply made due with it. A little syrup would leak out occasionally and become sugar and burn sealing the leak temporarily. We found out last year that the seal is dissolved by the sour sap, which resulted in quite a mess on the floor of the sugarhouse. This year I wanted to avoid such a mess. When I returned to the sugarhouse on Saturday, it was clear that our temporary fix was not working, so I emptied and disconnected the smaller pan to avoid any more flooding of the sugarhouse and to bring it home to clean. It is now in my garage in a kiddie wading pool. I am using some milk stone remover to loosen the scale. I applied some elbow grease to the project last evening, and it appears to be achieving the desired results. I will tackle it again later this week. Hopefully, with the additional effort the pan will be clean and ready for a return trip to the welder for another repair attempt.

This week I have been reading William Kittredge's Hole in the Sky. I am halfway through the book and find myself thinking that I will start over as soon as I finish it. It is a little like reading a foreign language in which I have very limited facility. I understand the story in terms of the facts and events, but the author's description of his emotional response to these facts and events is quite indecipherable. He has what appears to me to be a very obtuse style when he speaks of his subjective interpretations of and the meanings he ascribes to the events and fellow actors in his life. I don't think he is intentionally trying to be cryptic or enigmatic. At the outset, I thought I would catch on to the author's style after a chapter to two. Such has not been the case. His vocabulary is simple and common enough. What it is that eludes me eludes me still after 125 pages. It may simply be the brevity with which he speaks of these things. There appears to be an absence of adjectives and other descriptive words in his writing. It is mostly nouns and verbs in succinct declarative statements. Many of the sentences are grammatically incomplete which makes them mysterious at least to me.

Mr. Kittredge has an interesting story: he was in the Air Force during the Korean War and in graduate school working on a MFA (University of Iowa, Iowa Writers' Workshop) in 1968 during the Viet Nam war. (He had earlier earned an undergraduate degree in 1954 with a major in agriculture.) There was a certain parallel in those two conflicts especially as he experienced them. Between the Air Force and graduate school, he operated a ranch in southeastern Oregon. He was third generation rancher in that area. He speaks of the not so glorious side of fathers and sons and the choice of careers. Maybe what I thought was particular to the 60's is, in fact, typical of every age.

Now, am I being obtuse and enigmatic?

Clean up went well yesterday with full sun and temperatures in the 60's. It was just the kind of weather one prefers for an outside job which involves water. The taps were pulled and cleaned with a scouring pad to remove all organic material. The bagholders were disassembled and washed before being boxed up until next year. The filter can was washed. Part of the evaporator was disassembled and washed. The two pans (sap and syrup pans) were left with the last sap of the season to sour and dissolve much of the scale that built up during the season. (In 3 or 4 weeks, we will dump the soured sap and do the final clean up.) The evaporator stack was topped with an old bucket to keep the rain out. The collection buckets were washed along with the bulk tanks. The latter are stored inside during the off-season; they have an outside location during the season. The cupola doors were latched so that they are not rattled by the wind during the off-season. The syrup house was swept, and the garbage packed up and brought home. The empty LP cylinder was dropped off to be refilled. A final note was made on the calendar.

Mid-day today, the weather turned sour with rain and rain mixed with snow. It has continued into the evening and is forecast to continue through much of tomorrow. There has been some accumulation of snow with more expected. The wind has been gusting making for some winter-like conditions. How different from yesterday.

I finished late yesterday with a trip to the library to pick up some new reading material. More on that to follow.

We have called an end to the 2011 syrup season this afternoon after evaporating the last of the sap collected yesterday and finishing the last 2 and 3/4 gallons of syrup. We ended the season with a total of 47 and 1/2 gallons of syrup.

Clean-up remains--pulling the taps, dissembling the bags and bagholders, and washing all that stuff and more. We will tackle those tasks on Monday.

The snow and snow mixed with rain of last night and this morning with moderate temperatures helped mark the end of the season. There has been no sap flow since yesterday. Our sense is that any sap now will not be good for syrup,

When I returned home mid-afternoon, the snow had pretty much melted. The lawn appears to be considerably greener than it was yesterday before the snow. Moisture and nitrogen are probably responsible.

I need to make a trip to the library to replenish my reading materials. During the syrup season, I read a biography of Ted Geisel (better known as Dr. Suess) and a memoir by Susan Brind Morrow entitled "The Names of Things." Ms Morrow writes of her travels in Egypt and the surrounding countries in the 1980's and 90's. Her work is an insight into a very different Middle East than the one now making the nightly news. It was also a much more cordial place, at least for a European/American woman, who spoke the language, and embraced both the antiquity and the earthiness of the place.

It is easy to forget what day of the week it is. This is the last week of my syrup schedule, that is, the "day job" on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and general leave, aka vacation, on Tuesday and Thursday, which are then coupled with the weekend for syruping. I guess I am good to go as long as I make it to my "day job" on the right days.

Yesterday was a 12-hour day evaporating. We didn't gather sap at the end of the day choosing to leave it until this evening. Today we gathered 175 gallons of sap that had run yesterday and today. That means tomorrow will be a long evaporating day. Rick and I handled the collection today, so it was a workout gathering sap in five gallon buckets and hand carrying it all to the sugarhouse. Rick's adult children and very young grandchildren weren't available to help out today. Today we earned that end of the day beer--just one.

Friday morning when I return to my "day job" for the day, Rick and Bill will finish the estimated 10 plus gallons of syrup that we will have ready for the final bit of processing and bottling at that time. (Bill will be in town for a couple of days; the extra pair of hands are welcomed.) After that we will evaporate any remaining sap on hand and gather what may become available.

The forecast seems to bode well for a couple more days of syrup weather before we can expect overnight low temperatures above freezing along with some cold spring rain. It probably won't make for a very nice Easter weekend in terms of the weather. But I will welcome the end of the season; we've been at it since the 19th of March. It's been hard work and long days. I have lost a few pounds; I have acquired a bit of a tan; I have a sense that I am a bit more fit. Those are on top of a respectful volume of syrup "in the can." It is time to start thinking about next year, replenishing the woodpile, and other preparations.

If it is the end of the season, there will be clean up to do, which is a far from pleasant chore in the rain. Hopefully, we can schedule those tasks around the rain. There is bud swell on most of the maples so a bit of the poet's April showers/May flowers weather will result in bud break and a change in the sap, which means the end of the syrup season.

This afternoon we finished evaporating the remaining sap from yesterday and then collected 110 gallons of sap, which ran yesterday and today. We decided to call it a day rather to continue evaporating. I took the opportunity to rinse out the one bulk tank that we had been using most regularly. It appeared to be growing a bit of mold or bacteria and had an undesirable odor. A wash with a mild chlorine bleach solution and a thorough rinse seemed to take care of things. I have a 5:00PM meeting tomorrow night, so I will probably not get out to the sugarbush tomorrow. Tuesday is a vacation day, which will give me the opportunity to catch up on the evaporating, if there is catching up that needs to be done.